Gesture as a metaphorical process: an exploration through musical composition

Abstract

From the current literature review it is clear that there isn’t one shared definition of gesture. Studies of instrumental gesture are often related to body awareness, which is often not considered in traditional musical analysis. Departing from Ramstein’s functional and intrinsic approaches to gesture, and Delalande’s 2nd and 3rd level gesture categorization, this article aims to discuss, and give examples, on how different gestures were incorporated in the author’s music, specifically a contemporary music composition. The objective is to analyse the use of gesture in a musical context, as a compositional metaphorical process. The conclusions suggest that for any given gesture there are multiple ideas, each of which can expand the concept of performance and composition.

Keywords

• Contemporary music
• Gesture
• Musical narrative
• Metaphor
• Performance